


She Usually Doesn't Make it to the End

by LowkeeWB



Category: Black Lagoon (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Film References, Gen, Related to an Unpublished Work in Progress, Revy has a Grudge Against the Establishment, Revy has a Hard Past, Revy has a Hobby, Revy has a VHS Player and Boy Does She Use it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 05:55:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26967067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LowkeeWB/pseuds/LowkeeWB
Summary: Gunslinging and cigarettes get Revy through most of the day, and hard liquor gets her to the other side of sunset. But she needs something to keep the stillness of the night off of her. She's been turning to some old friends-- T.V and Movies.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	She Usually Doesn't Make it to the End

Yeah, she liked watching T.V. Revy didn’t talk about it much, but it was probably in her top five favorite things to do. She didn’t make a secret of it, but some parts of her ‘favorite things’ list were more obvious than others. Drinking and shooting were great fun, but they had their limits (running out of booze or bullets was a real fucking drag). Television was something that kept going, on and on, even when Revy wasn’t there. It was the simplest, silliest form of permanency in her life.

She could return from the Yellow Flag, liquor sloshing in her stomach alongside whatever street food she found on the way home, and the T.V would be there. Most of the building was freebooting off of the satellite dish that Benny had hooked up for her, and Revy was able to flip through a hundred-plus channels on repeat. She never gave a fuck what was on when she went channel surfing. Light and sound and the whole goddamn experience was what she was after.

Some days she’d be all twisted up over one thing or another, and she’d know she wouldn’t find what she needed through the satellite. She’d bust into some video store, grab a few tapes at random, and toss some baht to pay. Roanapur was the kind of city that siphoned valuables and detritus alike from the rich trade routes of the South China Sea. That included the media of the world, which found itself shoved into a dozen different storefronts, usually without any care for organization. For most people walking these streets, video ‘rental’ was a loosely respected concept. Racks full of VHS were depleted and resupplied alike by theft.

If Revy got lucky, she’d get a real Hollywood movie on one of her tapes, hopefully intact and without the good parts recorded over. She just needed something worth sitting still for, an experience that wouldn’t have her reaching for the 9-millimeter remote under her arm. It was nice to see something that she didn’t want to turn off.

Most of the time, she didn’t find what she wanted. If a shitty movie was on there was no solution outside of getting even drunker. Buddy cop movies made her puke harder than Bacardi. Revy had lost more than a few TV sets to a reflexive burst of gunfire when she saw limp-dick cops with mullets blasting away with their Berettas. American cops with their 12-pound trigger pulls. Fucking pigs, living in terror of the day they would have to back up their badge. At least the cops in Roanapur knew they were corrupt. There was nothing she hated more than a wannabe hero.

The same went for all those karate and kung-fu flicks that had been wasting her time since the eighties. Some blonde prettyboy trains for two minutes and gets good enough to beat all the Asians at their own game. The shit was predictable and repeated endlessly. That’s why Revy laughed for an hour straight when she finally saw Chuck Norris get his neck snapped by Bruce Lee in “Way of the Dragon”.

Now, some of the action movies coming out of Hong Kong could be real fun to watch. It was usually cops doing the shooting most of the time, but watching the action in slow motion gave it a sort of grace that didn’t really exist elsewhere. Some samurai movies came from the opposite direction, where the action would erupt from tense standoffs, swords drawn from scabbards like bullets from guns.

Most things that caught her off guard in real life were accompanied by people trying to kill her. She liked being surprised by something cool for once.

If one tape didn’t have anything she wanted, she would take a few slugs from her bottle and switch to the next one. Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of porn, although it was mostly the boring kind from the States (or Germany, if she was unlucky). All of the hard stuff had to be bought direct from the pimps and gangs that produced it. Although one time, Revy caught a tape of “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly” that had an actual snuff film recorded over a few minutes in the middle. She had been too drunk to do anything about it, and the rest of the movie rolled on as usual after the subject in the bootleg had stopped screaming. Westerns were always fun to watch otherwise.

There had been plenty of Westerns on T.V when she was a kid, too, but they were the sappy kind made so milk-drinking Americans could feel good about seeing people shoot people. She had been so desperate to find something worth watching as a kid, counting down the hours in a stinking apartment and hoping she would have the time to hide when her father came home. If she was lucky, he would pass out early and she might be able to find something to watch. Anything that could take her out of shitty fucking Chinatown and all its shitty fucking problems.

Unlike Roanapur, Chinatown was a place that had evolved to keep its sin on the inside. New York had never been a nice place for kids like her, even if it had been losing its edge before Revy fled. If she was lucky, she could sneak into a theater and get off the street for a few hours without some fucking creep bothering her in the flickering dark of the cinema. She’d get a seat as close to the screen and try to sink into the projection. It felt good to find something bigger than herself.

Rock obviously hadn’t watched as many movies or T.V from America. She didn’t know when her references landed. It had been different when she had been getting to know Dutch and Benny. They understood the ‘Cowboy’ and the ‘Action Star’ in a way that Rock just couldn’t. Maybe that was a good thing. He didn’t see himself like a character in a movie. He wasn’t a cheap actor following a script. He even stayed away from guns, which was absolutely unbelievable.

Even as classy as James Bond was made out to be, there were plenty of times that he had to pull out his little Walther and start blasting. Even though he acted like such a ladies man, Revy knew that sometimes, Bond just had to karate chop a bitch. Rock didn’t seem to agree on the potential necessity of a gun. She had accepted it by now, but it still made her think..

Benny stayed glued to his computers like a hacker straight out of a movie. Dutch played up his ‘Vietnam’ thing. Rock didn’t have anything except for his tie and his short sleeves. He wasn’t trying to fill some character’s boots. If he wasn’t a fighter, who was Rock trying to be? Some sort of mastermind like that Hans guy from Die Hard? Her memory of that movie was a little hazy, but she was pretty sure Hans ended up taking the short way down from a penthouse after a cop ruined his plans.

Revy didn’t see any characters like herself, either. The ‘femme fatales’ she saw on tape seemed like they were there mainly to wear dark clothing and take more time than usual to spread their legs for the hero. If there was a lady kicking ass on screen, she was probably a villain or the love interest. Either way, all that power they had at the beginning of the movie would be gone by the end. They’d just be some fucking body for the hero to be ruler of. It was bullshit, but Revy wondered if she could expect anything else from a cesspit like Los Angeles.

She knew she was being stupid every time she looked for a comparison of herself in the screen. The only time she could really see herself on the T.V was when it was switched off and the black box showed her reflection all curved up and silhouetted in the glass. It was no surprise she tried to keep the T.V running as long as possible then, even when she went to bed. If the alcohol kept her numb, watching videos was what kept her distracted.

Many was the night she let the flickering lights play across her eyelids as she tried to get to sleep, keeping the music from her cassette player loud enough to drown it all out. It kept her busy enough to never think beyond the next moment. The beginnings and endings on the screen were distraction enough. It kept her thoughts outside of her mind and off of her own story.

Each day, she would wake up sometime in the daylight, switch off the television, and draw her blinds open to let the sun in. No need to think of her own beginning, middle, and end. The office of the Black Lagoon Trading Company would be her next destination, and her only objective in life would be whatever the business of the day happened to be. It couldn’t be called honest work, but it was a living.

And if her work could handle her living, it was the world of video that could keep her dreaming. By those influences combined, it was almost enough. Almost.

**Author's Note:**

> This oneshot/essay spun off of something that I'm currently working on in this fandom (Fall of 2020). The waning of the first millennium brings new challenges. Roanapur's global connections begin to destabilize. The crewmembers can feel it in the air. The Black Lagoon Trading Company will not survive a full-scale gang war. Rock will be forced to make a hard decision. Will be published in batches once complete.


End file.
